Abstract
Social vulnerability influences the ability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters. The identification of vulnerable populations and factors that contribute to their vulnerability are crucial for effective disaster risk reduction. Nepal exhibits multihazard risk and has experienced socioeconomic and political upheaval in recent decades, further increasing susceptibility to hazards. However, we still know little regarding social vulnerability in Nepal. Here, we investigate social vulnerability in Nepal by adapting Social Vulnerability Index (SoVI) methods to the Nepali context. Variables such as caste, and populations who cannot speak/understand Nepali were added to reflect the essence of the Nepali context. Using principal component analysis, 39 variables were reduced to seven factors that explained 63.02% of variance in the data. Factor scores were summarized to calculate final SoVI scores. The highest levels of social vulnerability are concentrated in the central and western Mountain, western Hill, and central and eastern Tarai regions of Nepal, while the least vulnerable areas are in the central and eastern Hill regions. These findings, supplemented with smaller-scale analyses, have the potential to assist village officers, policymakers, and emergency managers in the development of more effective and geographically targeted disaster management programs.
Highlights
The frequency and intensity of disasters are increasing globally (de Haen and Hemrich 2007; CRED 2015; Huggel et al 2015)
Total Social Vulnerability Index (SoVI) scores were calculated by summing all seven principal components based on their cardinality, and the mean and standard deviations (SD) of the scores were calculated
The central and western Mountain, western Hill, and central and eastern Tarai regions exhibit relatively higher social vulnerability, while the central and eastern Hill regions reveal comparatively less vulnerability. This finding is interesting because elevation, natural hazard risk, and geophysical and hydrometeorological regimes are similar within each ecological region, but social vulnerability is not
Summary
The frequency and intensity of disasters are increasing globally (de Haen and Hemrich 2007; CRED 2015; Huggel et al 2015). This escalation parallels increases in human– environment interaction and in the number of people and asset values exposed to hazards. For example, tend to conceptualize vulnerability in terms of the likelihood of occurrence of a specific process and associated impacts on the built environment (Papathoma-Kohle et al 2011; Fuchs et al 2012). Social scientists tend to define vulnerability as a set of social, economic, and demographic factors that coalesce to determine people’s ability to cope with stressors (Wisner et al 2004; Juran and Trivedi 2015). Vulnerability manifests in stratification and unequal impacts among different
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